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5. They live in the US. The suggestion of metal detectors is laughable. You’d need to put one at the entrance of everyone’s home for that to be remotely effect

5. They live in the US. The suggestion of metal detectors is laughable. You’d need to put one at the entrance of everyone’s home for that to be remotely effective. The solution is to ban guns, full stop. And then slowly start to address the rotten national psyche that has led to where we are today.

StriverGuy 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks
emmelaich 7y ago
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/mass-shootings-by-country/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/mass-shootings-by...
- chumali 7y ago
  This is one of the worst attempts at an unbiased analysis of the issue that I've ever come across. Nothing of value can be garnered from this article. Clearly Albania, a country with per capita GDP less than a tenth of the US is not a suitable comparison. No attempt has been made to account for income as a confounding variable. The figures for Norway are predominantly driven by a single data point over the period compared to 67 mass shooting in the US over that same period. Surely this should be mentioned to allow for a proper interpretation of the data?
  - logicchains 7y ago
    What about France, Switzerland, Finland? They're all above the US, and don't have low GDP per capita (although I'm not sure why we're supposed to associate poor countries with more shootings).
logicchains 7y ago
Yes, the US and its cities like Christchurch and Copenhagen.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- grumpydba 7y ago
  Do you really want to compare the frequency of mass shootings in Denmark, New Zealand and the USA? It would only further support a gun ban.
tombert 7y ago
I'm actually ok with banning guns, but I very much dislike this reductionist mentality "these problems only affect Americans". As other commenters have pointed out, mass shootings happen everywhere, and acting like Americans are somehow special really bypasses a lot of problems.
- DanBC 7y ago
  But when they happen elsewhere we take action. They happen every week in the US.
  - tombert 7y ago
    Sure, and again I'm somewhat on the side of banning or very-heavily-regulating guns. I think it's a little unfair to take the US as a whole for this; the population of the US is 5x the population of England, and it's not a big homogeneous blob. Mass shootings don't typically happen in places like NYC, because there are much stricter gun laws.
- drewbug01 7y ago
  > As other commenters have pointed out, mass shootings happen everywhere, and acting like Americans are somehow special really bypasses a lot of problems. Not at this frequency! Truthfully - do you believe that mass shootings happen nearly _every day_ in other countries? No statistic I have ever read has supported that conclusion.
  - tombert 7y ago
    The US has a pretty large population, about 4x the population of Germany, 5x the population of England, 12x the population of Australia, and about 50x the population of Ireland, etc. By that virtue alone we are going to have more mass shootings. I don't have the statistics for China or India's mass shootings, but those would be more fair to compare in the shear numbers department. I definitely think our gun laws are stupid, I would support legislation to curtail or completely eliminate guns, but it's not like the US just has one generic kind of person; a big and diverse population is going to bring a lot of really cool and awesome people (many of whom move to big cities like NY or Chicago, which is why I like the US), but also a bunch of xenophobic idiots that also really like guns.
vorpalhex 7y ago
That would stop shooters, but we would see a great rise in arsons, car attacks and fertilizer bombs.. so kind of back to square one.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  What struck me about the El Paso shooter's manifesto was just how poor his rhetoric and reasoning is. Perhaps we should better teach writing, philosophy, and rhetoric in schools and not just focus on STEM. Or at least stats courses better so that one can look at statistics around demographic change and know that it doesn't imply there is a conspiracy afoot.
CNJ7654 7y ago
We're far passed the point where banning guns would be effective. There are almost as many guns in America as there are people. It would be like trying to ban cars, or phones, or air conditioners. The numbers just don't work.
bilbo0s 7y ago
>The solution is to ban guns.. There are logistical problems with that solution as well if we're being honest. How are you going to locate all however many hundred million firearms there are in the US? Even if it's just banning some weapons. How are you going to locate them all? Even if you could, these terrorists would just use truck bombs. As far as solutions go, the best option available in our current situation is probably to let our counter-terrorism operatives actually operate. At least up to now, they've been operating with kid gloves with respect to domestic terrorists.
- tombert 7y ago
  Didn't the gun ban in Australia work pretty well? I know the US has a lot more guns (even per capita) than Australia did, but if we started the process couldn't we conceivably curtail the spread of guns?
fkdo 7y ago
I disagree about banning guns. There are other weapons mass murders could use. Anthrax in the mail and homemade bombs have both been used in US history. We cannot reasonably prohibit access to all dangerous materials. Even a large SUV can be used to kill/injury several people. I think the biggest gains come from focusing on mental health. I see this is just one symptom of a much larger mental health crisis in the US. Other symptoms include high depression rates, high anxiety rates and high addiction rates.
systemtest 7y ago
The Netherlands has strict gun control and still has mass shootings. The last one a couple of months ago was with an illegally obtained AR-15. Four dead. Gun control did nothing to stop that. You need to fix the rotten mentality that has corrupted many American brains. That's the reason we have so few mass shootings in Europe. Quality of life is much better, for starters.
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  > Gun control did nothing to stop that [...] one but may have stopped many others where the difficulty in obtaining a firearm was the difference between an angry post on Facebook/Twitter/Livejournal and 9 dead in under a minute.
- mcaruso 7y ago
  > The Netherlands has strict gun control and still has mass shootings. I can think of two in my lifetime. The one you mentioned in Utrecht, and the Alphen aan den Rijn one in 2011. Even accounting for population size it's nowhere near the severity/frequency of the US. > Gun control did nothing to stop that. Gun control obviously isn't going to stop every attack. That doesn't mean it can't prevent many of them.
  - systemtest 7y ago
    In post WW2 history we only had two mass shootings and the Moluccan train hijacking in 1975 and 1977. Don’t forget everything that isn’t covered by the media. In 2018 we had 527 registered shooting incidents. In the last 18 months we had 44 gun related deaths. In 2018 the police seized 76 automatic weapons such as the AR-15. For a country with strict gun control that’s a lot.
kbutler 7y ago
> 5. They live in the US. This is not factual. The Lankford study generally cited has been shown to ignore most non-US mass shootings. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736 Lankford’s study reported that from 1966 to 2012, there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. We find that Lankford’s data represent a gross undercount of foreign attacks. Our list contains 1,448 attacks and at least 3,081 shooters outside the United States over just the last 15 years of the period that Lankford examined." Data available: https://crimeresearch.org/data/ https://crimeresearch.org/data/ Yes, the US has a problem with gun violence, mass shootings, and suicides. No, it isn't unique to the US, and gun ownership isn't correlated (at least with the murders and mass shootings). "The US ranks 58th in attack rate and 62st in murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia are major European countries with at least 45% higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States. The rates in Pakistan and India are respectively 555% and 76% higher than the US rate." > The solution is to ban guns, full stop. Similarly inaccurate: "Lankford’s claim that higher rates of gun ownership are associated with more mass public shooters completely disappears when this more complete data on mass public shooters is used"

StriverGuy 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks

emmelaich 7y ago

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/mass-shootings-by-country/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/mass-shootings-by...

chumali 7y ago
This is one of the worst attempts at an unbiased analysis of the issue that I've ever come across. Nothing of value can be garnered from this article. Clearly Albania, a country with per capita GDP less than a tenth of the US is not a suitable comparison. No attempt has been made to account for income as a confounding variable. The figures for Norway are predominantly driven by a single data point over the period compared to 67 mass shooting in the US over that same period. Surely this should be mentioned to allow for a proper interpretation of the data?
- logicchains 7y ago
  What about France, Switzerland, Finland? They're all above the US, and don't have low GDP per capita (although I'm not sure why we're supposed to associate poor countries with more shootings).

logicchains 7y ago

Yes, the US and its cities like Christchurch and Copenhagen.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
grumpydba 7y ago
Do you really want to compare the frequency of mass shootings in Denmark, New Zealand and the USA? It would only further support a gun ban.

tombert 7y ago

I'm actually ok with banning guns, but I very much dislike this reductionist mentality "these problems only affect Americans". As other commenters have pointed out, mass shootings happen everywhere, and acting like Americans are somehow special really bypasses a lot of problems.

DanBC 7y ago
But when they happen elsewhere we take action. They happen every week in the US.
- tombert 7y ago
  Sure, and again I'm somewhat on the side of banning or very-heavily-regulating guns. I think it's a little unfair to take the US as a whole for this; the population of the US is 5x the population of England, and it's not a big homogeneous blob. Mass shootings don't typically happen in places like NYC, because there are much stricter gun laws.
drewbug01 7y ago
> As other commenters have pointed out, mass shootings happen everywhere, and acting like Americans are somehow special really bypasses a lot of problems. Not at this frequency! Truthfully - do you believe that mass shootings happen nearly _every day_ in other countries? No statistic I have ever read has supported that conclusion.
- tombert 7y ago
  The US has a pretty large population, about 4x the population of Germany, 5x the population of England, 12x the population of Australia, and about 50x the population of Ireland, etc. By that virtue alone we are going to have more mass shootings. I don't have the statistics for China or India's mass shootings, but those would be more fair to compare in the shear numbers department. I definitely think our gun laws are stupid, I would support legislation to curtail or completely eliminate guns, but it's not like the US just has one generic kind of person; a big and diverse population is going to bring a lot of really cool and awesome people (many of whom move to big cities like NY or Chicago, which is why I like the US), but also a bunch of xenophobic idiots that also really like guns.

vorpalhex 7y ago

That would stop shooters, but we would see a great rise in arsons, car attacks and fertilizer bombs.. so kind of back to square one.

mieseratte 7y ago
What struck me about the El Paso shooter's manifesto was just how poor his rhetoric and reasoning is. Perhaps we should better teach writing, philosophy, and rhetoric in schools and not just focus on STEM. Or at least stats courses better so that one can look at statistics around demographic change and know that it doesn't imply there is a conspiracy afoot.

CNJ7654 7y ago

We're far passed the point where banning guns would be effective. There are almost as many guns in America as there are people. It would be like trying to ban cars, or phones, or air conditioners. The numbers just don't work.

bilbo0s 7y ago

>The solution is to ban guns.. There are logistical problems with that solution as well if we're being honest. How are you going to locate all however many hundred million firearms there are in the US? Even if it's just banning some weapons. How are you going to locate them all? Even if you could, these terrorists would just use truck bombs. As far as solutions go, the best option available in our current situation is probably to let our counter-terrorism operatives actually operate. At least up to now, they've been operating with kid gloves with respect to domestic terrorists.

tombert 7y ago
Didn't the gun ban in Australia work pretty well? I know the US has a lot more guns (even per capita) than Australia did, but if we started the process couldn't we conceivably curtail the spread of guns?

fkdo 7y ago

I disagree about banning guns. There are other weapons mass murders could use. Anthrax in the mail and homemade bombs have both been used in US history. We cannot reasonably prohibit access to all dangerous materials. Even a large SUV can be used to kill/injury several people. I think the biggest gains come from focusing on mental health. I see this is just one symptom of a much larger mental health crisis in the US. Other symptoms include high depression rates, high anxiety rates and high addiction rates.

systemtest 7y ago

The Netherlands has strict gun control and still has mass shootings. The last one a couple of months ago was with an illegally obtained AR-15. Four dead. Gun control did nothing to stop that. You need to fix the rotten mentality that has corrupted many American brains. That's the reason we have so few mass shootings in Europe. Quality of life is much better, for starters.

zimpenfish 7y ago
> Gun control did nothing to stop that [...] one but may have stopped many others where the difficulty in obtaining a firearm was the difference between an angry post on Facebook/Twitter/Livejournal and 9 dead in under a minute.
mcaruso 7y ago
> The Netherlands has strict gun control and still has mass shootings. I can think of two in my lifetime. The one you mentioned in Utrecht, and the Alphen aan den Rijn one in 2011. Even accounting for population size it's nowhere near the severity/frequency of the US. > Gun control did nothing to stop that. Gun control obviously isn't going to stop every attack. That doesn't mean it can't prevent many of them.
- systemtest 7y ago
  In post WW2 history we only had two mass shootings and the Moluccan train hijacking in 1975 and 1977. Don’t forget everything that isn’t covered by the media. In 2018 we had 527 registered shooting incidents. In the last 18 months we had 44 gun related deaths. In 2018 the police seized 76 automatic weapons such as the AR-15. For a country with strict gun control that’s a lot.

kbutler 7y ago

> 5. They live in the US. This is not factual. The Lankford study generally cited has been shown to ignore most non-US mass shootings. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736 Lankford’s study reported that from 1966 to 2012, there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. We find that Lankford’s data represent a gross undercount of foreign attacks. Our list contains 1,448 attacks and at least 3,081 shooters outside the United States over just the last 15 years of the period that Lankford examined." Data available: https://crimeresearch.org/data/ https://crimeresearch.org/data/ Yes, the US has a problem with gun violence, mass shootings, and suicides. No, it isn't unique to the US, and gun ownership isn't correlated (at least with the murders and mass shootings). "The US ranks 58th in attack rate and 62st in murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia are major European countries with at least 45% higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States. The rates in Pakistan and India are respectively 555% and 76% higher than the US rate." > The solution is to ban guns, full stop. Similarly inaccurate: "Lankford’s claim that higher rates of gun ownership are associated with more mass public shooters completely disappears when this more complete data on mass public shooters is used"